Christmas on the Mersey

by Annie Groves

  ‘Do you know where they are now?’ Kitty stopped pouring and pulled up a chair.

  ‘Back in Southport. I got a phone call from Charlie’s next-door neighbour this morning,’ Rita explained. ‘I can’t get the train because the railway lines are down after the raids. I wish I could bring them home. I miss them so much. I’ve got them some toys – nothing fancy, there’s not much to buy – and Pop has made Michael a smashing wooden train set and a little doll’s house for Megan – if they ever come home.’

  ‘There’s a woman down Trevelyan Road who’s got some American comics,’ Kitty said. ‘I would have got you some but they’re more for older boys. I got our Tommy a couple and I think Danny would enjoy them, too.’

  Rita smiled. If life was hard for her it must be even worse for Kitty. Looking at the time on the mantelpiece clock, the only thing to adorn Kitty’s fireplace, Rita knew it was time to make tracks. She had spent far too long talking and must be off. Sitting here talking to Kitty and drinking her tea ration was getting nothing done.

  ‘Have you heard anything from Charlie?’

  Rita was quiet for a moment.

  ‘You remember what I told you I’d heard from the lady next door when I went to Southport, about Charlie and “his wife” living there? Well, I only had her word for it, of course, but I’ve just overheard Vera Delaney telling Ma Kennedy that Charlie and this woman are living as man and wife.’ Rita wondered how it affected her children. Did they call this new woman ‘Mam’?

  ‘You know what Vera’s like, Rita.’ Kitty patted her friend’s arm. ‘She’s probably got the wrong end of the whole situation and is making a forest out of a stick.’

  Rita knew that Kitty, the eternal optimist, was trying to make her feel better, but it was too late to bury her head in the sand. ‘I doubt it, Kit, and I intend to find out and claim my children back.’

  ‘Good for you, love.’ Kitty’s expression became concerned. ‘Are there any trains running out that way today?’

  ‘No, there aren’t. I shall have to wait.’ She got up from the straight-backed chair at the kitchen table. ‘I’ll see you later, Kit.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, Rita,’ Kitty said as they reached the front door, ‘but if I didn’t know you, and someone told me you and Charlie Kennedy were man and wife I would never believe them. You’re far too decent for the likes of him.’

  Rita hugged her and wished her all the best for the Christmas season, feeling Kitty’s innocent warmth radiate towards her along the narrow hallway as she left.

  Violet made her way through the back ginnels towards one of Salford’s three-up three-down terraced houses that looked much the same as Empire Street, with their front parlours and their outside lavatories. She came under cover of the early morning darkness to prevent tongues wagging, and she closed the back gate very carefully and very quietly behind her.

  ‘It’s only me!’ she called softly as she opened the unlocked back door that led to the kitchen beyond. The difference between this and Dolly’s cosy kitchen was stark. This one possessed hardly a stick of furniture, the table under the thin, scarred window had been second- or maybe third-hand when her mother took possession of it, and Violet noticed the dilapid­ated couch was in need of some kind of cover to hide the bulging horsehair stuffing. The ash-covered coals threw out no heat, making the poverty-stricken room drab and cheerless.

  ‘Hmmph! You took your time, I must say.’ A toothless woman in a faded old pinny, ragged slippers and a woollen headscarf tied in a knot below her chin, did not look in the least bit pleased to see her daughter.

  ‘I came as soon as I could, Mam,’ Violet said quickly. Automatically she felt the brown clay teapot that sat in the middle of the old-fashioned square table covered in soiled newspaper. It was cold, as she expected.

  ‘Shall I make a fresh pot of tea, Mam?’ Violet said as if she had last seen her mother recently instead of the morning of her wedding last August. ‘I came as soon as I heard about the raid.’

  ‘There’s nowt in. I’ve got no tea,’ Mrs Brown told her daughter, who for as much as she could not stand the man her mother had married, still loved her mother. ‘I had to hitch a lift from the Mersey docks. There’s no public trains, only troop trains.’

  ‘Oh, is that what I am? The public – grand,’ Mrs Brown said miserably, and Violet wondered why she took everything so personally. However, she tried to keep the conversation on a positive footing. ‘The railway people don’t mean you, Mam, they mean people who are not in the Forces. They need space to get supplies across the country.’

  ‘We got it full belt last night,’ Mrs Brown said in a dull voice. Violet took it to mean an enemy raid. ‘I were on me own most o’ night – until he came home stinkin’ drunk from t’ pub.’

  While Liverpool had suffered a lighter raid, it seemed that Manchester was now the main target for Hitler’s wrath.

  ‘I had to come and make sure you were all right, Mam,’ Violet said, pulling a rickety chair from under the grimy table. She grimaced when she saw the half-filled bottle of brown sauce, which had no lid to prevent the crusty residue attracting God-knew-what. Although Violet doubted the mice would grow fat in this place. The saltcellar was perched in its usual place on the black, almost fireless range, to prevent it going damp.

  ‘I wish they’d bombed the hell out o’ that pub,’ Mrs Brown said bitterly.

  ‘Have you heard anything from the kids?’ Violet had two younger half-brothers and two half-sisters. She had told Dolly and Pop – even Eddy, her husband – a complete set of lies when she’d said her beloved parents, a vicar and his wife, had been killed when their pristine house was bombed. She was not the only child of devout parents at all.

  She was one of eight. Three were her own full brothers and sisters, all older than she, and who had now left home and had families of their own. They had little time for the family they had left behind. The other four were the living product of her mother’s second husband, whom she had married fifteen years ago when Violet was only five. Her mother had a baby every year almost, lost many, kept four, while he spent as much time as possible in the alehouse because he could not stand the noise – not that it had anything to do with him, Violet thought drily. When he had started to look at her in a leering way each time he came home from the pub, she vowed to get away as soon as possible.

  Shuddering with disgust, she came back to reassure herself that this place was as bad as she remembered. It was. Life had been unbearable!

  Once the kids had been evacuated, the oldest being almost fourteen and the youngest seven, Violet set her cap at Eddy, refusing to be her mother’s support any longer. It was a shame her mam suffered with her nerves, but Violet could not bear to be in the same house as that hateful man much longer, and was of the opinion that her mother had married him so she was welcome to him.

  She had been writing to the each of her siblings and they all said the same: they were much happier now, away from this miserable hovel. Looking at her shrivelled mother, not much older than forty and married to a belligerent drunk, Violet knew exactly what she did not want in life. If Eddy or his family ever found out about this, she would die of shame.

  ‘Is everything all right, Mam? You sounded upset when you wrote.’

  ‘Upset? Did I?’ Mrs Brown said miserably, staring into a fireless grate. ‘Is it any wonder when I’m married to a feckless waster who is neither use nor ornament? Not a care for me.’

  Violet fought the urge to remind her mother that nobody had forced her to marry him. It would not do either of them any good raking up the past. It was the here and now they had to worry about.

  ‘Wouldn’t you think about doing a bit of war work instead of scrubbing other people’s houses, Mam? It pays more.’ Violet broached the subject with caution, knowing her mother did not take kindly to being told what to do, even if it was for her own good.

  ‘War work? War work! I wouldn’t know how to do war work!’

  ‘No,’ Vi said,
remembering, ‘I know.’ Her mother had never been a good mixer, and the solitary toil of domestic drudgery was all she had ever known.

  Her thoughts now turned to Dolly, who could not find enough hours in the day to do the things she wanted to do. And here was her own mother, sitting in the same sagging chair by the dead fire, her cardigan dragged around her hungry body.

  ‘I’ve brought you a few bits,’ Violet said, opening her bag. She knew Dolly thought she was mean with her own rations, but she had been saving to bring her mother a bit of Christmas cheer, knowing she would not have any spare.

  She put some bread, cheese and bacon on the table. The sight of the food lit up her mother’s eyes for a fleeting moment. However, if things were still the same as they used to be, Violet doubted her mother would get to taste any of it.

  ‘He’ll enjoy that for his Christmas breakfast,’ Mrs Brown said wearily, wiping a dewdrop from the tip of her nose with the cuff of her cardigan sleeve. Violet sighed in exasperation. She had forgotten the time when her mother laughed, really laughed like the Feenys or the Callaghans did. Her mother, not one for demonstrations of affection at the best of times, would not think of passing a compliment, or giving a hug as the Feenys did so automatically.

  All this was the reason Eddy had never met her family. Violet’s heart lurched now at the thought of Eddy. He would not look down his nose if he found out she came from this … this hellhole. However, he would then know he was married to a liar.

  ‘Mam, the bacon is for you too. It’ll be a nice treat on a butty for Christmas morning.’ The least her mother deserved.

  ‘Nice I’d look eating bacon, when he’ll be watching every mouthful,’ Mrs Brown huffed. ‘No, I’ll dip me dry bread in the fat, same as allus! That’ll do me.’

  ‘Mam!’ Violet protested. ‘That won’t do!’ Even the warning glare was not going to stop her having her say this time. ‘You bent over backwards for that man and what thanks did you get?’ Even now, Violet refused to call him her father – because he was not.

  ‘You mind yours and I’ll mind mine, if you please.’ There wasn’t a sniff of thanks for the rations and Violet knew that’s all her mother would get of them – a sniff, because when he came in this lot would be gone in one sitting – the greedy fat pig!

  It was Christmas but there was no sign of cheer in this house, not because of the war but because there never had been a celebration of any kind. That would mean him spending money on somebody other than himself. It was a far cry from the days when there had been just the two of them, happy in their own way, after Violet’s elder siblings had gone to school. ‘Here, let me make you a cup of tea and something to eat.’

  Violet was determined that her mother was not going to give all this away to him.

  A short while later, she watched as her mother devoured the bacon sandwich, and wondered when she had last eaten. Only when she was quite satisfied her mam had had her fill and was now on her second cup of tea, did Violet stand up and put on her coat. It was growing dark and she still had to get all the way back to Liverpool.

  How she wished that fat drunken upstart had come back from the pub early so she could have it out with him. Her poor mother was half-starved while he drank all the money for which she worked her fingers to the bone. He needed reporting! And she would do it, too, but her mother, frightened of her own shadow, would never forgive her. She drank her black, weak, sugarless tea and could tell her mother was on pins – she did not want him coming in and catching her there.

  ‘Well, I’ll be off Mam.’ Violet could see that she wasn’t going to be offered so much as a piece of dry bread after her long journey. How she was going to get back to Liverpool again she did not know. But get back she must, because if she stayed in this place one minute longer she would scream until her lips turned blue – the way she used to.

  ‘Try and get out a bit more, Mam.’ Violet turned to her now and her heart went out to this woman who had sacrificed everything for a man who could not care less. She put half a crown on the table. ‘Don’t give it to him, Mam. Save it and buy yourself something nice.’

  ‘Aye,’ her mother sighed. ‘I will that.’

  There were no hugs or fancy words before Violet left the same way she came. But the grateful look in her mother’s eyes said everything that was needed.

  ‘Look after yoursel’, Mam,’ Violet said, looking up the back yard towards the cheerless house before she closed the back gate and hurried up the ginnel.

  The air-raid siren started as she headed out of Manchester. Luckily she managed to get a train, which was full of soldiers on leave. One even offered her his hip flask but Violet refused. They deserved their drinks after what they’d been through. Suddenly Violet realised how soft she had got since she moved to Empire Street. A short while ago she would have turned her nose up at such public displays of merrymaking.

  The soldiers’ chatter was about pubs of mutual interest and who was going to win the league, unaware that teams played twice a day, to make the numbers on the football coupons, each team taking turns to play at home in the morning and away in the afternoon.

  As the train journeyed towards Liverpool, Violet was unaware that the Manchester raids were of the same magnitude as the ones suffered by Bootle the previous nights. Nor did she know that the meal she had lovingly prepared for her mother would be her last, as the gable end of the house crushed the last breath from her malnourished body.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘Look, there’s no risk,’ Delaney said when he visited Danny in hospital. For a time, Danny had been warned not to do anything more strenuous than breathe in and out, but at last his fitness was gradually improving. He couldn’t wait to get out of here and refrained from telling the doctor he had a family to support.

  However, he knew he would not be strong enough to return to the docks for a while yet. And with Kitty working he would not be entitled to means-tested National Assistance money. But he would not live off his sister when he got home.

  He had his pride and would not accept hand-outs. Danny had no illusions; he had more about him than his deluded father, who always thought there would be something better around the corner. Well, all he could say was it must have been one hell of a big corner, because his poor ould fella never did see the ‘something better’.

  ‘Of course there’s a risk, Alf.’ Danny had to be careful what he said; Delaney could make life unbearable if he thought Danny was not on his side. He spoke in a whisper. ‘You’re asking me to take the medical test for you. That’s fraud, that is, and we could both go to prison.’

  This wasn’t the first time that Alfie Delany had mentioned that he wanted Danny to take his army medical test for him. Despite all of this big talk, Alfie was a coward and would do anything to avoid his call-up. Danny knew that there was nothing that would have made him prouder than to have fought for his country, but that wasn’t to be. He couldn’t believe that Alfie had the nerve to ask him to do it again. He had no intention of doing so, but Alfie was persistent and used to getting his own way. By hook or by crook.

  Danny had a few bob saved, and Kitty was earning in the NAAFI. Something was bound to turn up in the New Year. He did not want to get mixed up in anything dodgy, especially when dodgy also meant dealing with Harry Calendar, a notorious spiv who lived in un­ashamed luxury in the Dingle Mansions and who was behind most of Alfie’s dodgy deals.

  ‘How’s that little brother of yours doing? It was a good thing I was passing that warehouse when I was. Things could have gone very differently if it wasn’t for me, you know.’

  Danny knew it was only a matter of time before Delaney brought up his supposed rescue of Tommy. He was going to use this as emotional blackmail and if that didn’t work, he’d try something else.

  ‘Anyway, you have a little think on it, Danny boy,’ Delaney said, ‘I know you’ll come right in the end. Besides, Mr Calendar and I both know a few things about you that might surprise a few people.’ Alfie’s voice was light in tone,
but there was no mistaking the menace behind it. This was a veiled threat. If Danny didn’t take that test, then Aflie was likely to fit him up for something. He was between the devil and the deep blue sea. He watched as Delaney opened a newspaper parcel he had brought in.

  ‘What do you think about these, Dan?’ Delaney showed him a brand-new pair of leather football boots. ‘Would your Tommy be made up with these?’

  Danny eyed the boots cautiously.

  ‘Any player in the Northern League would be made up with those, Alf.’

  ‘Here, give them to Tommy for Christmas with my compliments.’ Alfie thrust them into Danny’s hand. ‘As a pal, I wouldn’t dream of taking a penny for them.’

  ‘Hang on, Alf …’ Danny would never be able to afford these in a million years. They were beauties. However, he would rather Tommy went without and he himself not be beholden to the charge hand and his sneaky practices.

  ‘Now, don’t bite your nose off to spite your face, Dan,’ Alfie laughed as he got up to go. ‘I’m sure you can always do me a favour one day. Now, I must be off … people to see, things to do, etc.’ Alfie tapped Danny’s arms lightly. ‘Remember what I said, Danny boy. I’ll be seeing you.’ And with that he was gone.

  Danny knew that Alfie was setting him up. But from his hospital bed, it seemed like he was a sitting duck for Alfie’s machinations. Accepting the boots confirmed he was obligated to Delaney now – if he tried to put a bit of distance between them, no doubt Alfie would use his connections with Harry Calendar to rope him in and Danny had a good idea where that would lead.

  He needed time to mull things over. He would need every ounce of energy he had to outwit Delaney … it wouldn’t be easy. Danny might be cleverer than Alfie, but Alfie was persistent and had his health …

  A friendly face at the porthole window curtailed any further cogitating.

  ‘Are you decent, Danny?’ Sarah laughed as she came in carrying an armful of brown paper carrier bags. ‘I brought you something to cheer you up.’